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If you’re not yet watching Star Trek Continues, you should be. They’ve produced four brilliant classic-era Star Trek episodes so far, with the fifth debuting soon. I love them all, but, even though I have a cameo in the fourth episode, “The White Iris,” my favorite is the third one, “Fairest of Them All,” directed (as is the fourth) by my great friend James Kerwin (who also directed the brilliant SF noir film Yesterday was a Lie).

“Fairest of Them All” is my favorite not just because it’s technically brilliant and beautifully acted but also because I’m a morally committed lifelong pacifist — a worldview I got from having two thoughtful academics as parents, from having a Unitarian as a mother, and from watching classic Star Trek.

So many Star Trek fan productions (going right back to the first ASCII-character computer games from the 1970s) seem to utterly forget that Star Trek was about pacifism: about Halkans who were willing to die rather than become accessories to killing; about Spock who would argue for pacifism; about Organians who showed both Kirk and Kor the evils of war; about Kirk sparing the Gorn who doubtless would have killed him; about Surak who turned a whole violent race to peace; about a prophetic woman who knew that one day we’ll take all the money we spend now on war and death and spend it on life instead; about humanitarians and statesmen who had a dream that spread among the stars and made all men brothers.

“Fairest of Them All” nobly explores those high ideals, while still telling a rollicking, enormously entertaining story.